The Curious Case of the Television Star Running Against Vladimir Putin

Ksenia Sobchak has won praise from Russian activists and journalists. But no one gets on the Presidential ballot without Putin’s permission.

Photograph by Evgenya Novozhenina / Sputnik / AP

There was a bit of cringing in the standing-room-only crowd in one of
the larger Columbia University halls when the Russian Presidential
candidate Ksenia Sobchak spoke there last Thursday. A wave of discomfort
washed over the room when Sobchak said, “Russia is the biggest European
nation,” and added, “We are Europeans, we are not Asians.” Another wave
came after an audience member noted that Sobchak has risked alienating
voters by voicing support for L.G.B.T. people and even same-sex
marriage; Sobchak lamented that Russian television would surely now
disregard all the serious topics that had been discussed that evening,
and focus instead on the frivolous topic of L.G.B.T. rights.

Aside from those moments, though, the audience loved Sobchak, the
thirty-six-year-old television personality whose name will appear on the
ballot in the Presidential election, or what passes for a Presidential
election, on March 18th. One after another, graduate students, Russia
scholars, and Russian exiles congratulated Sobchak for her courage. The
outcome of the exercise known as the election is preordained—Vladimir
Putin, who has been in power for more than eighteen years, will gain
another six-year mandate—but Sobchak has been using her campaign to
speak out about taboo subjects, including Russian political prisoners.
She even went to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, to draw attention to
the case of Oyub Tetiev, a human-rights activist who was arrested on
what appear to be falsified drug charges. That brought her praise from
some Russian activists and journalists who had been skeptical of her
campaign.

It’s easy to be skeptical. Sobchak is a woman, blond, wealthy, of
reality-television fame, and she has a close family connection to Putin.
Her father was Anatoly Sobchak, the first post-Soviet mayor of St.
Petersburg, who, back in 1990, hired a K.G.B. officer named Vladimir
Putin to be his deputy. The relationship lasted. Working in the shadow
of his charismatic boss, Putin accumulated wealth and power. When the
St. Petersburg city council suspected Putin of embezzlement and demanded
a prosecution, the mayor disbanded the city council. In 1996, Sobchak
lost his bid for reëlection. Soon after, he became the object of an
investigation into the misuse of funds and city property, and his former
deputy helped him leave the country. In 1999, Putin emerged from
obscurity as the Prime Minister and likely next President—and within a
few months he helped his former boss return from exile. In February,
2000, Sobchak suddenly died, and Putin, then acting President, cried at
his funeral. All this is well known, as is the fact that no one gets on
the ballot in Russia without Putin’s permission. In fact, his best-known
opponent, the anti-corruption activist Alexey Navalny, has been denied a
spot—and has called for a boycott of the election in protest. It would
follow that Putin put Ksenia Sobchak on the ballot.

Up close, Sobchak is a bit more complicated. I have observed her for
more than ten years, and have interviewed her on a few occasions. In
2011, when mass protests broke out in Russia, I watched her join the
demonstrations. She seemed to develop a political conscience overnight.
It was like watching someone grow a new limb: she seemed surprised but
determined, or resigned to changes in herself that she couldn’t control.
She gave up a lucrative career on state television. After the protests
ended and the political crackdown began, she was subjected to threats
and at least one highly public and humiliating police search of her
apartment. She became a host on a Web-based opposition television
channel. In 2015, death threats compelled her to leave the country for a
couple of months.

For a while now, Sobchak told me last Thursday, she has been working on
a film about her father. She kept asking Putin for an interview, and he
finally granted one this fall. She used the opportunity to tell him that
she had decided to challenge him in the election. She said that he
wasn’t pleased.

Here is where one has to bring up two long-standing rumors: the one
about the baptism, and the one about the death. There exists a photo of
Putin with Ksenia’s parents, taken, apparently, right after
twelve-year-old Ksenia had been belatedly baptized. There have been
persistent rumors that Putin is Ksenia’s godfather. She has said that he
is not: Putin attended the baptism but had no formal role in it. (She
also told me that she had submitted to the baptism solely to please her
mother.) The other rumor concerns Ksenia’s father. Anatoly Sobchak had
been campaigning for Putin when he died, of an apparent heart attack.
The details are weird; the witnesses—two former K.G.B. officers who were
accompanying Sobchak on the trip—are dead, both of gunshot wounds.
Ksenia’s mother, a senator, has said that she knows the truth about her
husband’s death but doesn’t feel safe disclosing it. Some people believe
that Sobchak was killed in advance of Putin’s first Presidential
election because he knew too much.

Ksenia Sobchak had a generally understanding attitude toward Putin. “I
think he is a patriot,” she said. “I think he sees himself as holding
Russia together through superhuman effort—and yet not letting it slide
into some sort of a military-junta situation.” Putin has stretched,
re-interpreted, and altered the Russian constitution to allow himself to
stay in power for as long as he has, but Sobchak believes that, after
another six-year term, he will be looking for a way to step down. And
then he will need a successor.

Is that the position Sobchak is angling for? She demurred, saying that she was still an inexperienced politician. But a second later she became
animated. “That’s the tragedy of our country,” she said. “Everyone is an
inexperienced politician.” She confessed that she wants to become the
kind of politician who enjoys both the confidence of those with power
and the trust of those who oppose Putin.

Even assuming that this strange construction could be plausible, why
would Putin choose Sobchak to be his successor? The answer is simple: he
could trust her to protect him from prosecution the way that he once
protected her father. She believes that Putin would want to leave
office, if only his personal safety and the security of his wealth could
be guaranteed.

Of course, that assumes that Putin isn’t going to try to stay in office
indefinitely—and that he didn’t give an order to kill Sobchak’s father.

And what about those rumors? Sobchak believes that Putin is not a
murderer: political murders that take place in Russia with some
regularity are, in her opinion, the work of zealous supporters, rather
than the execution of explicit orders. And back in 2000, she said, Putin
did not yet have those kinds of zealous supporters. “I’m aware of those
ideas,” Sobchak told me, about the whispers that Putin had her father
killed. “But that’s just unthinkable. If that is true, then the world is
an entirely different place than I imagine.”